


Peace in our time.

by orange_crushed



Series: Peace in our time/Maturity [1]
Category: Doctor Who
Genre: F/M, Pete's World
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-16
Updated: 2011-04-16
Packaged: 2017-10-18 03:35:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,891
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/184549
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orange_crushed/pseuds/orange_crushed
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She couldn't ever have imagined a universe where he would ask such a thing, and now she's living in it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Peace in our time.

It's a long wait, in Norway.

She took the car and the cooler of water bottles and the industrial-sized pack of tissues for granted, last time; now, an hour and twenty minutes in, waiting for the jeeps as her skin reddens and chaps and her unshed tears jam themselves up her nostrils and into the sinuses around her eyes, she wishes they could've called Pete in advance. Or brought an umbrella. Her mother is sitting on the rocks above the tideline and arguing with Pete on the mobile about something; Rose hears the words _Tony_ and _fridge_ and _no_ repeated several times and decides to tune it out.

He is sitting by himself in the sand, like an idiot, carving out looping designs in the wet mash that are identical to the ones she's seen scrawled on post-it notes around the console. His language. Probably the first time that language has been written in this universe, ever.

Well, hooray.

"Are you alright ?" she finds herself asking. Not too warmly, even though her mouth still tastes like alien oranges where he kissed it. Magnificently. She's not angry with him, exactly; she's angry with the universe and _him_ and herself and the Daleks and a lot of other people on a long list in her mind. But at the moment, he is all that's nearby. "It won't be a long wait. Do you need anything ?" she asks, too, as if she had anything to offer.

He looks up at her, against the sun, shading his eyes with one hand. She's sure the uncertainty is all over her face, but he doesn't seem to mind it; he smiles up at her, rather, with a disarming brightness. She keeps forgetting how incredibly new he is.

"Well," he says. "You."

Ridiculous man. She won't know it until much later; years, even; but it is then that she forgives him.

 

 

There are a lot of things, now, that she cannot do. She cannot let go of him because she has let go of him- of him, and him- so many times and never by her own choice, already. She cannot give herself over completely, not now, not yet, because she cannot even figure the whole goddam thing out. She cannot forget. And she cannot ignore him because he immediately moved in with her and started stealing her blankets.

"This- is- _my_ \- hairbrush," she hisses slowly and with exaggerated care, as if English were his fourth language, or his fiftieth (which it is.) She shakes it in his direction.

"Then I need one of my own !" he yells back at her. They stare each other down in the hallway, red-faced and awkward at the doors. "Okay ? I'll just buy my own !"

"Well, good !"

"Fine !"

"Great !" she hollers. And stops, lowers the brush to her side and tilts her head. "Why are we still yelling ?"

"I don't know." He deflates, almost visibly, and puts his hands in his pockets. It's a defensive move, one she knows so well that she blinks back sudden tears. He doesn't move forward to hold her or ask if she's alright; there's a knot in his throat and he's trying to talk past it. "Do you think-" he says, rocking slightly on his heels, smiling at her with those sad, lovely eyes. They're set to a slow burn, watching her pull her hands into her own sleeves- they mirror one another, inside their own odd armors. They used to have arguments like this before he changed. "Do you think we'll get better at this ?"

"We might," she says.

 

 

"So- let me get this straight." He rifles through the box of crackers, finds the one with the most cheese-related flavoring hanging onto its crackery undulations and shoves it into his mouth; eyes still glued to the television screen. "There's no such thing as MTV."

"What you're watching is VMT." She takes the box out of his hand. "Vitex Music Television."

"That's your-"

"I had to be on their New Year's Spectacular, last January. Pulling the lever for the fireworks. And I was wearing this hideous dress that my mum had done for me." She grimaces around the cheese in her mouth and pops in another cracker, chewing resentfully at the memory. "Green sequins. Hated it."

"Why'd you wear it ?"

"Because she locked me in the hotel room with it, and the windows were too high to climb out." He chokes, and sprays crumbs all over the coffee table. "What _exactly_ is so funny about that ?"

"It's so-" he laughs, doubling over, and his elbow hits the channel remote, and suddenly they're watching a nature special about water buffalo instead of top forty hits. He laughs and he keeps laughing and then he does a water buffalo impression and she cracks. It's not the first real laugh she's had since she came back; no, the first real laugh was when he fell off the side of her bed trying to undo his own trousers for the first other thing. But that night was strange and sexy and sad in places, too, and this is just- them. No pressure, no pain. Two pints between them, with dinner. And now he's wearing a pillow on his head and pretending to be a rhino, so there's that as well.

"It's so what ?" she asks, much later.

"It's so Tyler," he says, like the authority on the subject. He smiles at her and ruffles her hair and lies back against the pillow, folding his arms under his head. "Do you still have VH1, at least ?" he asks, as if he hadn't started this train of thought five hours ago and lost it and done found it again. She couldn't ever have imagined a universe where he would ask such a thing, and now she's living in it. "There was this show- Best Week. Best Week _Ever_ ," he corrects himself. "And they always had this part where they-"

"Oh, go to sleep," she says, hitting him. He turns over, grumbling, but he puts his hip against her hip and his toes on her calf to be sure that he's touching her before he nods off. And then he does. She lies awake, feeling his single heart pound slowly through the pulse in his feet.

It rains in the middle of the night.

 

 

"What's that for ?" she asks. Her tone might be read as mild irritation but oh well, she's irritated; they're standing in a rainstorm in the middle of a field and for all they know, knee-high fish-faced aliens have stolen their car. It's been raining for three days straight. And he's intently fiddling with what looks like a toaster stapled to a stolen hotel hairdryer.

Which it very probably is.

"It's an atmospheric disruptor !" he calls out, above the noise of thunder. "It's very disruptive !"

"I'll disrupt you," she says. "Does it work ?"

He doesn't answer, just holds it above his head with an idiotic grin and tells her to cover her ears; she does, but it doesn't make a difference- the sound is deafening and in a second she has to take them off to put out the fire on his sleeve, because it's stopped raining.

"It works !" he yells. "Now the Fellexi will dry out- they need the rain, you know. Constant water movement on their skin. Otherwise, they start to scale up and they're much easier to catch." He's still smiling like the looniest kind of loon. "Fancy going fishing ?"

"And me without my waders," she grins back.

Of course it's not that simple- the tiny Fellexi have driven their car into the lake in a panic- but it all works out alright. "You were brilliant today," she tells him, wringing out the nets. "How'd you calibrate that thing in the middle of a monsoon ? You didn't even have-" she doesn't finish that sentence, doesn't say _the sonic_ , because there are still some words that are traps. Even now. Maybe forever. She knows she doesn't want to hurt him, and that can only be a good thing. "Anything," she adds. "All the gear was in the car."

"I'll tell you how, Rose _Ty_ ler," he says, sliding up against her ear; he smells like an aquarium and he's likely growing mold in the armpits of that suit, but he's flirting with her, right here and now. He's got hope, and she likes that about him. "I ran the numbers in my head- a five-four ratio of hydrogen and a little particle I like to call- well, I should wait for the patent, really." He grins. "It was all very complicated."

"Really ?"

"Nope," he whispers, with delight. "I _guessed_."

It's so familiar that it hurts and then it doesn't hurt; it stops hurting and feels like nothing at all for a long minute while he lifts her in triumph and spins her around and they make whooping noises like a plane taking off.

And then it feels oddly like joy.

 

 

"You don't do this," she says, evenly.

The Bnool held her prisoner for almost a whole hour, which is nothing when you think about it but he had a whole hour to think about it; and he's half-human and going to die someday, so she understands that time is of the essence for him in new and frightening ways. It's touching. But it's no reason for him to be aiming a plasma cannon at their central life-support column.

"Yes, I do." His face is a mask. "You've forgotten." He hefts the strap over his shoulder, steadying himself for the shot. "Stand back." She doesn't- instead, she rests her hand on his arm and pulls him, gently, almost to face her. She touches the stubble below his sideburns with one hand, holding his eyes with her own. They're terrified and furious and lost, child's eyes in a man's face. She won't give him up to this. "Rose-"

"Give them a chance," she says. "Just give them a chance."

He does, and for once they take it.

Later, exhausted and slumped against the side of the Torchwood van, wrapped variously in blankets and burn patches by an overzealous medic, she leans her head on his shoulder and tells him that she's proud of him. He seems to stiffen with insulted male pride, which unfortunately for him is the kind of pride that has always amused her most.

"Are you trying to save me ?" he tries to make the tone light and mocking, but he doesn't succeed; he sounds as if he is genuinely asking, and fears the answer more than a little. "I'm not your duty," he adds, with a bitterness she didn't know he contained.

"I'm the one that has to live with you," she answers.

" _Has_ to ?" Oh, he's really looking for a reason to argue, now, she can tell. Good to know that stroppy tone of voice wasn't altered in the duplication process. "So you're obligated." He scowls into his blanket and she nuzzles the wooly shoulder she's leaning on, causing him to almost tip over. "Honour-bound. Your medals must be in the post." He pretends to ignore her cuddling, and she laughs softly under her breath.

"I have to live with you, yes," she tells him. The lunatic. "Because I love you, and without you I'd go totally spare and own cats. I can't have that."

It's the first time she's said it.

From the way that he kisses her then, pressing her into the van and then falling on top of her in the road and reaching under her shirt with a desperate sort of happiness, she's sure he noticed.

 

 

There is a first grey hair.

A first couple of pounds around her hips that she can't shake, even with the cardio-boxing and the endless running that followed them here, home, to this universe.

A first physical, under the eye of the secure and discreet Torchwood doctors. "This," he tells her, having run away like a coward down the hall in his paper gown, skinny knees bare and pale, "is _crap_."

A first fight about laundry (well, the tenth, but the others were more like _why do your boring human laundry when we could be seeing the golden moons of Klaber_ , and he'd always won those.)

They survive them all.

They've survived worse.

 

 

"What do you want out of life ?" he asks her, only once, when they are totally alone on the grounds of her father's house; it's the first night they've been back in the country for almost a year and a half. Before now it was Burma and Egypt and Finland; Finland mostly by accident, though they found great souvenirs. So they returned and Jackie threw a party and they both climbed out the window to avoid it.

He spreads his coat out on the grass and they watch the stars turning in unbelievable slowness; perfect arcs of grace and quiet, and a silence only broken by breath.

It's such a human question that she can't believe for a second that he's actually asked it, but here he is looking at her like he wants an answer, studious and focused, hoping to learn something from the experience. It's so much the alien and the man in the same gesture, in the way that always boggles her head slightly and makes her dizzy. She pulls herself back from that ledge- he wears slippers and eats sausages and snores and can't steer a glider to save his life. He's human where it counts. He's trying to work it out. Maybe he deserves a real answer.

"Oh, the usual," she says. "Cheesy stuff. I don't think I can say- it'll come out like an infomercial about children's causes."

"Go ahead."

His fingers slip around her wrist, feeling for the pulse; she can feel her pulse, and his, almost in time. It's the same pace at which rivers run and light filters through window blinds; the pace at which bicycle wheels turn and secretaries type. It's steady in a way that she's never been steady. And it doesn't make her feel sorry, or sad. She's a part of something- of him, of herself, of this earth and this place. All the mess and rumble of creation. She's waited her whole life so far for the world to suddenly make sense, to fall into place; but it never will, thank God. She's not sure what she would do if it did.

The same as she's doing now, probably.

"To be happy," she says, softly. "To be loved. To love." She leans up on one elbow and regards him. "To do something good with my life. Something that has meaning."

"Ah," he says.

"Ah ?" She arches one perfect eyebrow. "Just- ah ?"

"I was thinking something similar for myself," he says. "No, that's a lie. I was thinking about canapes." She giggles. He stares up into the blackness and the salt-and-pepper stars and clears his throat. "Did you know, I can remember my whole life ?" It seems like a rhetorical question, so she doesn't cut in on the thought. He goes on. "All the places and the people and the stuff. Lots of stuff. They have hovering dinner plates on Capraxis."

"I remember."

"You should, you threw one at me."

"It was in the service of the greater good," she says, mildly.

"Do you miss it ?" he asks her. She knows what he's going to say, but she lets him finish. It's taken him a lot to get this far; to be the one who opens up, the one who asks. He points up. "All of that ?"

"Yes," she answers. "Would you miss this ?"

"Rose," he says, rolling over to hold onto her and press his mouth to her temples; not a kiss, not really, just breathing into her scalp and smelling the salt on her skin and staying there for a long minute. "Yes."

 

 

"I'll never understand," he pants, stark naked and sweaty beside her, one leg still draped over the arm of the sofa, "how your species evolved with only one heart when _this_ is your favorite activity." He shoots her a handsomely dirty grin. "After eating, of course."

She doesn't dignify that with a reply, being still slightly out of breath and tingly at the knees; she just swats him and lets him kiss the parts of her that he can reach. "I was thinking about something. There's a butter shop that I saw when we were coming into town- imagine, a whole shop devoted to butter." His eyes glaze over. "Do you think they'll have it in press-molds ? Little butter houses ? Little butter cars and animals ?" She stares at him. "What ?"

"Everything's an adventure with you, isn't it ?" she says, wonderingly. He grins. There's more than just happiness behind it, there's patience and kindness and curiosity there, as ever, as she looks deeper into his face; it's a face she's adored since she was nineteen, which is weird to think about, with parts of her life already beginning to pass. She'll never make sense of this, but she knows now that's not the point.

"Yep."

"So what's next for us, Doctor ?" She circles her index finger on his palm, along the lifelines and the scratches from yesterday's fall in a thornbush. His skin's warm. "What happens now ?"

"Just you wait," he tells her. "Just you wait."


End file.
